Meta

Tag: germany

Can you imagine how horrible it must have been for those poor souls at the Strasbourg Christmas market killed or grievously wounded by yet another of those “lone wolf” terrorists yelling Allahu Akbar?

Actually, most of us can because most of us have been to a Christmas market. We know what they’re like: tacky, cheesy, boozy, expensive but kind of fun – exactly what you need to put you in the festive mood.

You drink Glühwein, or Apfelwein, or similar – and get a warm fuzzy glow, which takes the edge off your anxiety (of which more in a moment…).

You buy overpriced Lebkuchen – gingerbread men in the shape of Father Christmas or a snowman or even rainbow-coloured unicorns.

Things I learned about the Germans after a fortnight living as a non–tourist in Frankfurt:

1. Germans, and Germany generally, are among the world’s most underrated things. True they are not so adept at wit, snark, banter, jocularity or general frivolity. But they are kind, welcoming, generous and unlike, say, the French, charmingly grateful when you attempt to speak their quaint, guttural, impossibly inflected language even though — stimmt! — they speak yours so much better.
2. Here’s what happened when I lost my wallet.

“Civil war is coming to Europe,” a German city politician told me this week.

I shan’t mention his name – it was an off-the-record briefing and, anyway, in Germany there are penalties for this kind of frankness.

But he was only repeating what plenty of other people say in private in Germany where I’ve spent the last couple of weeks, soaking up the atmosphere, people-watching, gauging the public mood in the wake of Angela Merkel’s open invitation to perhaps three million immigrants – most of them fighting-age males from Muslim countries.

Three million is higher than the figure admitted by the German authorities, which tend to put it closer to 1.5 million. My source tells me the higher number is closer to the mark.

I was staying in Frankfurt, not one of the places hardest hit by the immigration wave. Partly this is because its traditions as an “open city” date back centuries so, culturally it has always been better attuned to accepting and absorbing immigrants from all backgrounds. Partly it’s because, being Germany’s financial centre, it tends to attract the better educated sort of immigrant.

Germany, epicentre of global environmentalism, is losing faith in the green dream. Its energy minister has admitted that it will fall some way short of its 2020 climate targets and that voters are weary of the renewable energy projects which in Germany alone cost taxpayers around €25 billion per year.

Voters across Europe have lost faith in politics partly because of “unachievable targets” on renewable energy, said German Energy Minister Peter Altmaier, who rejected calls from a group of other EU countries to boost the share of renewables to 33-35% of the bloc’s energy mix by 2030. […]

“Germany supports responsible but achievable targets,” Altmaier said from the outset, underlining Berlin’s efforts to raise the share of renewables to 15% of the country’s overall energy mix.

But he said those efforts also carried a cost for the German taxpayer, which he put at €25 billion per year. “And if we are setting targets that are definitely above 30%, that means that within a decade, our share has to be more than doubled – clearly more than doubled,” Altmaier pointed out.

Rather than cutting emissions of the greenhouse gas by 40 percent compared with 1990 levels, Europe’s largest economy will manage reductions of just 32 percent, said the annual climate report for 2017 signed off by Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cabinet.

The shortfall of eight percentage points translates into around 100 million tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) pumped into the air annually.

These are shocking admissions from the country which has probably done more than any other to advocate for “clean energy”. Germany had set itself the ambitious target of becoming completely independent of fossil fuels in a scheme known as Energiewende.

This was the slogan of the Remain campaign during Britain’s EU referendum. It didn’t persuade the 17.4 million people who voted Brexit, most of whom see the EU for what it really is: a corrupt, sclerotic, socialistic, anti-democratic, anti-capitalist, authoritarian superstate run primarily in the interests of the country that lost the war but won the peace, Germany.

Ever since, bitter Remoaners have been lining up on the BBC to explain how this was a huge mistake and how we should all vote again to get the correct result this time.

But what if new evidence emerged to prove that those untutored, ill-educated, knuckle-dragging peasants who were stupid enough to vote for Brexit were right all along?

Germany has ‘massively weakened’ its climate action plan for next week’s G20 summit in Hamburg in order to appease Donald Trump.

According to a shocked report in the green, EU-linked propaganda outlet Climate Change Newsthis represents a disastrous cultural surrender which

“….shows the degree to which the German presidency has bent to the will of the Trump White House.”

In public, Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel has been talking tough on climate change, promising to put it at the forefront of the G20 summit and making none-too-subtle swipes at any world leaders out there who happen to dissent from her position.

Without naming him, Merkel appeared to lament U.S. President Donald Trump’s uncertainty about human-induced climate change, saying, “We can’t, and we won’t, wait until the last person on Earth is convinced of the scientific evidence for climate change.”

Behind the scenes, however, it would appear that Merkel’s negotiating teams have been bending over backwards to tone down the climate action plan and avoid an embarrassing rejection by Donald Trump.

This can be seen by comparing the two draft climate action plans for the summit, one from March and the revised one from May. According to Climate Change News, American negotiators have watered it down considerably.

“The US massively weakened the language in the energy part of the action plan,” one source with knowledge of the negotiations said. “It pushed for references to so-called ‘clean’ fossil fuels and made it less explicit that the energy transition has to be built on energy efficiency and renewables.”

“It also provided cover to some other G20 members – such as the Saudis and Russia – to weaken some climate sections of the document, including the pledge to phase out fossil fuel subsidies.”

Here are some of the elements which have been removed from the original draft:

A 2025 deadline for the end of fossil fuel subsidies

References to the risk of “stranded assets”

A call for “the alignment of public expenditure and infrastructure planning with the goals of the Paris Agreement”

A push for carbon pricing

A commitment to publish mid-century decarbonisation blueprints by next year

A pledge to develop a “profound” climate plan for multilateral development banks

Seven references to the UN’s 2018 review of nationally-determined contributions

11 references to the 2050 mid-century pathway for net zero emission

16 mentions of infrastructure decarbonisation

In other words, this represents the most massive victory for climate rationalism and energy realism – and a crushing and humiliating defeat for the global green blob.

It’s also a spectacular vindication of the Trump presidency.

As I argued in December last year before the inauguration, Trump had the potential to become a climate super hero: the one man on earth with the power to turn back the tide of green lunacy which has swamped the planet for last four decades.

The Green Blob’s tentacles extend everywhere: into our kids’ classrooms (where they are brainwashed with environmental propaganda); into our universities (where whole departments have now been hijacked by green junk science—because hey, that’s where the money is); into the mainstream media (most of which repeats, unquestioningly, the spurious claims of impending eco-disaster put out by environmental activists and publicity-hungry university departments); into business, which now wastes billions on environmental compliance and billions more on energy costs artificially inflated by the almost entirely unnecessary government-mandated drive for renewables); into government (where few politicians, even now, have the nous to appreciate that they have been sold a pup and who still continue to inflict more “sustainable” initiatives on their hapless electorates); into the economy, where jobs have been killed and growth blighted by measures designed by eco-fascists on a self-admitted mission to destroy Western industrial civilisation; into the environment, which has been ravaged by the very things we’re told are supposed to help save it—from bat-chomping, bird-slicing eco crucifixes to those forests in the US which have been chopped down to create wood-chip biofuels to be burned at Britain’s Drax power station to the rare-earth minerals mined in appalling conditions in China to make wind turbines; into the cost of living (inflated by green taxes, regulations and tariffs), where in some cases people have been driven into fuel poverty and an early death because governments like Obama’s have caused electricity prices “necessarily” to “skyrocket” by mandating renewables over cheaper, more reliable fossil fuel.

This insanity has been allowed to prevail, largely unchecked, for over four decades. While enriching a corrupt few, it has caused misery to billions. It costs the global economy at least $1.5 trillion every year in “decarbonisation” expenditure which serves no purpose other than to give virtue-signallers a warm glow of self-righteous satisfaction.

And no major politician, anywhere in the world, has had either the courage or the conviction to deal with it.

Until now.

Yes there have been a few wobbles on the way, including some resistance even from within his own administration. But though the battle is far from won, what’s clear is that Trump really means what he says about making America’s energy economy great again. (And undoing the disastrous legacy of the Obama administration).

Germany has effectively declared war on Britain via its EU functionaries. How should Britain respond? Well, I can see at least three good reasons for accepting their challenge.

We got in lots of practice from 1914 to 1918 and again from 1939 and 1945. Plus, unlike the Germans, we’re still pretty match fit from Iraq and Afghanistan. So the next one should be a walkover.

The German military is fat, unfit and swarming with peaceniks who have been brainwashed by an education system which for the last 70 years has been teaching them that “war is bad, m’kay?”

Free men always fight better than slaves. (See, e.g., Victor Davis Hanson’s Carnage and Culture). Germans really have nothing left worth fighting for: they are ruled by an elective dictatorship; their country is no longer theirs.

But I think if we are going to make absolutely sure of winning this one, there’s one thing we’re going to have to do first: dismantle the BBC.

Anyone who watched the BBC Nine O’Clock News last night with Laura Kuenssberg will know exactly what I’m talking about here.

Usually, BBC star reporters attempt at least a half-hearted gesture at pretending to be politically neutral in their reportage. But last night, on the BBC’s lead comment item on Britain’s Brexit negotiations, Kuenssberg was so flagrantly partisan that she might as well have done to the strains of Ode to Joy while draped in the blue and gold-starred Euro flag and wearing a huge badge saying “I heart Jean-Claude Juncker.”

Let’s just briefly recap on what has happened so far:

Theresa May invited President of the European Commission Jean Claude Juncker and his entourage to dinner at 10 Downing Street. Though it was reportedly all smiles on the occasion itself, afterwards a very different version of events was leaked to a German newspaper – possibly by Juncker himself, more likely by his sinister chief of staff, a German lawyer and dark arts practitioner called Martin Selmayr.

According to this German version of events, the evening had been “desastrose” and “eine Katastrophe.” Juncker had made it clear that “Brexit cannot be a success” and had – after some characteristically ill-mannered remarks about British cuisine – left dinner feeling “ten times more sceptical” about the prospects of a smooth Brexit transition. Juncker then reportedly phoned German Chancellor Angela Merkel to tell her that Mrs May was “living in a different galaxy” and “deluded.” At which point Mrs Merkel could have chosen to pour oil on troubled waters by insisting that as far as Germany was concerned the only aim was to find a Brexit agreement satisfactory to all parties. But she didn’t. Instead, Mrs Merkel stuck in the knife by making a speech to the German parliament warning that Mrs May should drop her “illusions”.

That’s just the number estimated to have died in the winter of 2014 because they were unable to afford fuel bills driven artificially high by renewable energy tariffs.

But the real death toll will certainly be much higher when you take into account the air pollution caused when Germany decided to abandon nuclear power after Fukushima and ramp up its coal-burning instead; and also when you consider the massive increase in diesel pollution – the result of EU-driven anti-CO2 policies – which may be responsible for as many as 500,000 deaths a year.

But even that 40,000 figure is disgraceful enough, given that greenies are always trying to take the moral high ground and tell us that people who oppose their policies are uncaring and selfish.

It comes from an article in the German online magazine FOCUS about Energiewende (Energy Transition) – the disastrous policy I mentioned earlier this week whereby Germany is committed to abandoning cheap, effective fossil fuel power and converting its economy to expensive, inefficient renewables (aka unreliables) instead.

According to FOCUS around ten percent of the European population are now living in ‘energy poverty’ because electricity prices have risen, on average, by 42 percent in the last eight years. In Germany alone this amounts to seven million households.

The article is titled: The grand electricity lie: why electricity is becoming a luxury.

The reason, of course, is that green energy policies have made it that way. Many of these have emanated from the European Union, which in turn has taken its cue from the most Green-infested nation in Europe – Germany.

Germany has long been obsessed with all things environmental. Besides having invented the dodgy ‘science’ of ecology in the 1880s it was also, of course, between 1933 and 1945 the home of Europe’s official “Greenest government ever” – the first to ban smoking on public transport, an enthusiastic supporter of organic food, national parks and population control.

The Greens have also since the early Eighties been arguably the most influential party in Germany. Though their percentage of the vote has rarely risen above the 10 percent mark, they have punched above their weight either as a coalition partner in government or as a pressure group outside it.

For example, the reason that after Fukushima, Chancellor Angela Merkel completely changed Germany’s policy on nuclear power was her terror of the Greens who were suddenly polling 25 percent of the national vote.

It was the Greens too who were responsible for Energiewende – the policy which is turning Germany into the opposite of what most of us imagine it to be: not the economic powerhouse we’ve been taught to admire all these years, but a gibbering basket case.

This becomes clear in an investigation by the German newspaper Handelsblatt, which reports the horrendous industrial decline brought about by green energy policies.

I’m afraid I disagree. The time to make political capital out of atrocities like this is precisely when the bodies are still warm and the limbs haven’t been swept up. That’s because – you see this again and again from the Boston bombings to the murder of Lee Rigby to the Charlie Hebdo – our decadent, supine, relativistic, Western liberal culture would dearly love to pretend that these are rare criminal events which we should learn to take in our stride and to which we should not ‘overreact’.

And I personally think the people who have been killed and maimed so cruelly and unfairly deserve better than that.

If their deaths and injuries are to mean anything, then surely the very least we owe the victims is to ask ourselves honestly why this happened and how we can reduce the likelihood of it happening again. Getting squeamish about speaking home truths on grounds of “taste” does not honour these victims. It insults them.

Here is why this morning’s bombings happened: political Islam is at war with the West.

It may suit our complacency to reassure ourselves that we’re not at war with Islam but that’s not going to make any difference to the sundry Jihadist cells now plotting even bigger atrocities all over the world.

They understand perfectly well what’s going on even if we refuse to.

For the basics, read John Ware’s superb profile of the Muslim Brotherhood in Standpoint.

Political Islam has absolutely no interest in finding any accommodations with what it considers to be our worthless Western culture. Its aim is total conquest. To deny this is a bit like reading Mein Kampf and going “Yeah but he doesn’t really mean it.”

This is why, increasingly, immigrant Muslim communities are failing to integrate with their host countries in the West, be they the US and Canada, those in Europe or in Australasia. Even if you believe that practitioners of “soft” Islam are in the majority, the moderates don’t stand a chance against the aggressive proselytising of the fanatical hotheads.

The situation is not unakin to that of Germany around 1933. Up until then, many if not most Germans had found Hitler’s short-trousered, strutting, zealots to be vulgar, unpleasant and not at all where they wanted to be politically. But the aggression and ruthlessness of those zealots overcame all resistance, so that even the moderates who despised them found it easier to endorse them and go with the flow. I’m sure there are lots of lovely Muslim families from Bradford to Molenbeek who’d prefer their daughters to be subject to British and Belgian law rather than the de facto jurisdiction of their local sharia courts. But I’m not sure it’s an option open to them.

The Mayor of Cologne has suggested that local women observe a “Code of Conduct” so that they can avoid a repeat of New Year’s Eve when dozens were molested, mugged and, in at least one case, allegedly raped by an organised gang of around 1000 migrants from the Religion of Peace, Harmony and Social Cohesion (TM).

Mayor Henriette Reker – who has cautioned against blaming migrants for the attacks – has said on television:

“The women and young girls have to be more protected in the future so these things don’t happen again. This means, they should go out and have fun, but they need to be better prepared…”

Today at Breitbart we offer a sneak preview of the kind of “code of conduct” this impeccably progressive mayor might have in mind.

1. Dress modestly at all times

It is an Islamophobic myth that covering your hair – or better still, your entire face – is in any way demeaning to women. On the contrary, it can send out a strong, empowering signal that you refuse to be defined by traditional, oppressive male notions of beauty – as these recommended outfits clearly demonstrate…

2. Rape is not always rape

Remember, in the West rape is only rape under certain conditions: if the attacker is white; if he identifies as male (as opposed to “trans”, in which case rape is permissible or at least excusable); if you were stinking drunk at the time and he is a Welsh footballer; if you attended a party at a US university frat house; if you woke up with a hangover and have been told by your college Women’s Officer that you now regret what you did last night; if you are an attention-seeking, mattress-carrying, man-hater; if you are Lena Dunham.

If, however, the alleged perpetrator is of Muslim extraction – and most especially if you are a twelve or thirteen year old girl in the North of England – then the authorities are likely to look more leniently on the alleged crime, which isn’t a crime at all really. More a vibrant expression of cultural differences.